Fire and Ice
by shadowhuntingdauntlessdemigod
Summary: "Fire and ice. The soldier and the spy. Two complete and utter opposites. Yet they were the only ones that could control the unstoppable feelings that were set upon destroying the other. Fire melted ice. Ice calmed the raging fire. It made it possible for both of them to live." Romanogers


**This is just a small piece that I wrote, not really a oneshot, because it has no plot, so I don't really know what to call it. Just a way to express my Romanogers feels then I guess :) Hope you enjoy!**

 **If I owned Marvel and it's characters, which I don't, Age of Ultron would have had more Romanogers.**

* * *

The fire was all she had ever known. She was born into it, lived through it, and would most likely die because of it. She watched her home burn, a raging and uncontrolled brightness that stood out against the dark, snowy surroundings, taking her parents from her when she was only a little girl. That was the night when her shivering in the snow stopped. She stopped feeling the cold the moment that the men took her from the smoldering ruins of her house. She burned as the experiments started and the serum races its way through her small body, setting her blood ablaze.

Burn. Burn. Burn. The one word that could sum up her entire life.

She was created to make the world ignite beneath her feet and at the lightest touch of her fingertips. People, buildings, lives, all scorched in her wake. She could feel her soul blistering every time the gun lay smoking in her hands, another victim at her feet. The burns on her skin would heal, but the scorch marks on her soul were harder, if not impossible, to erase.

She thought that once she escaped the flaming world of her captors, she would finally be free. That was not the case. The flames chased her, continuing to lick at her heels every time she dropper her guard or let someone get too close to her.

So she put on a mask. She put a facade in place to hide who she really was inside. While that protection allowed people to get closer to her, it was also suffocating her. Bit by bit, her past was engulfing her. The fire inside of her stone shell was eating up all of the oxygen.

Her lithe frame was set on fire time and time again as bullets tore through her flesh. Her cheeks were set ablaze with anger and embarrassment as the cocky inventor would make jokes about her and the soldier. Fire and ice. It was never meant to be. There was no way it could be. And yet, it somehow was.

* * *

He had always been cold. It had always been his worst enemy. It had always been there. Making all of his health problems exponentially worse. Biting into his small form with a tenacity that would never cease until he gave up. Which was never. His entire childhood and early life he had lived side by side with the snow and the wind and the icy cold. Even after he changed, the frigid feeling that sank into his bones never did. He fought in the cold, mission after mission, snowflakes catching on his red, white, and blue uniform. Coating his shield and the weapons his team used to help free the world. Obscuring his view of the enemy when he needed it most.

Cold. Cold. Cold. The sensation that had made him feel so alone, even when he was surrounded by the people he fought beside, the soldiers and friends that he trusted with his life.

In total, directly and indirectly, he watched thirty-two of his men die of the same cold that he should've been taken by multiple times, years before the crash. Shaking and stuttering out words passed blue lips, he watched them go, one by one. The singular mission, the disaster, that would haunt him forever. If not for the serum, the death count on that mission would have been thirty-three.

Even in what he thought were his last moments, he was freezing. Surrounded by ice and helplessly alone. He was born into the cold, it would've been right to die there too. But he didn't. Instead, he was awoken into the world again, expecting this time to finally be warm.

He was still frozen. Frozen in time, in mindset, in the memories of the people that he had left behind. In the brother that he had let fall with snowy wind cutting knives into his uniform. In the promise that he had not kept. He was still cold. He doubted for the longest time that his frozen and calloused soul would ever touch the heat of a flame again.

When the mask of the assassin slipped off, he found his heart shatter. The man that had meant so much to him, the man that had defended him against the cold, no longer knew who he was. Watching the assassin struggle to remember as his fists connected with the warm flesh of his face was a terrible experience. The warm blood flowed out of his wounds, but all he felt was cold. Then the water. The terrible, awfully cold water of the river, seeping into his uniform, enveloping him in an even thicker layer of ice until he was pulled from it.

* * *

He didn't feel warmth again until he saw her. The flame haired assassin that radiated heat. It warmed his soul, made him feel something again, gave him a place in the world to belong. She gave him something to fight for. Every word she said, every joke she made, seemed to melt a little of the icy wall that he had put up around his heart. In the first battle they had ever fought in together, he made sure that it was his shield protecting her from the fire that rained down from the sky. Even though she didn't need it, he did everything in his power to make sure that she was safe.

And when she kissed him on the escalator, he was convinced that his lips had been burned. It was even more intense than the frostbite he had endured for almost his entire life. Her soft lips on his warm cheek had further pushed that idea.

Amid all of the death and cold stone, the feel of her lips against him had shone light into his world.

His coldness began to bleed into her burning heart, quenching some of the flames that had long resided there. He was there for her in the middle of the night when she would wake up burning and screaming from another fiery memory of her past. He was always there with cool hands, running them down her arms in a calm and collected manner until she stopped seeing the flames. The world would gently fade from red to normal the longer he held her, the longer her eternal fire seemed to be kept at bay.

She was there for him when he would lay sleeping in bed, shivering horribly under two blankets, mumbling about people long dead and gone. How they were laid cold and stiff in their tombs, as he should have been in the frozen skeleton of the once formidable metal beast. His hands would turn to ice and his muscles would become tense until the nightmare passed. Until there was something to warm him. She would lay next to him and wrap herself around him until the shaking had stopped and he no longer felt cold to the touch. By that time, she was no longer burning.

Fire and ice. The soldier and the spy. Two complete and utter opposites. Yet they were the only ones that could control the unstoppable feelings that were set upon destroying the other. Fire melted ice. Ice calmed the raging fire. It made it possible for both of them to live. For without each other, without a shoulder to lean their head upon once and a while, without someone to listen and understand their struggles, they would both be consumed by their pasts. One in the lonely, frozen wasteland of his soul; and the other in the burning, fiery depths of her subconscious.


End file.
